Free Electrico W by Herve Le Tellier

thing, don’t tell me, whatever you do, you fool … Telling your age makes you older.”
    A sudden bright light made me look up. Something was twinkling far overhead, way up in a huge rubber palm whose leaves hung over the top of the building, over the bay window. The twinkling came from a pair of round, steel-framed glasses. As it had grown, the plant had gradually engulfed the metal sidepieces, and the glasses were set right into the trunk. Two growths within the wood, two bulging green protuberances, formed a pair of froglike eyes. I instinctively pushed my own glasses back up my nose. Aurora noticed the gesture.
    “Are you admiring Monstro?” she asked. “When I was little, even littler, it used to frighten me with its strangecut-out leaves, like witches’ masks. So I put an old pair of glasses between two of its branches. Then when it grew they were imprisoned. I called it Monstro because, according to the gardeners, it’s a
monstera deliciosa
. And it was the name of the whale in
Pinocchio
, you know, the film of
Pinocchio
 …”
    I couldn’t take my eyes off Monstro, off that pair of glasses trapped in the thick trunk where acrid white sap must have been seeping over them. That fragment of human life gave the towering plant a strange personality. Behind the filthy lenses, you could almost imagine there lurked a climbing-plant philosophy, with sententious words impounded in its chlorophyll.
    Aurora was smiling mischievously. She must have been keeping a real, far deeper secret.
    “Well,” said Antonio, “I think Monstro was one of your lovers and you were bored of him and turned him into a philodendron.”
    Aurora touched Antonio’s cheek very lightly.
    “You’re so clever, Antonio,” she said mockingly. “You guessed. I always turn my lovers into plants, do you think there would be this many here otherwise? Over there, that drooping fatsia, the one that needs water and is drying out because I won’t let anyone water it, that’s that idiot José. He was always hovering around me, constantly trying to look at my breasts, when he gave me an ice cream, when he read a book over my shoulder … Oneday, what a nightmare, he put his hand on my hip. Ugh, it was disgusting. And in a flash, changed him into a fatsia. Ciao, José.”
    She ran over to a burgeoning plant clinging to a wall of rock.
    “This staghorn fern here is Ruiz, he always wanted people to believe he was a real man. He rolled his pack of cigarettes in the sleeve of his T-shirt and made a lot of noise on his scooter. He’s much quieter like this, with these dangling fronds like dogs’ tongues.”
    She gave a sneer to staghorn-Ruiz, walked on a few paces, and stroked a leaf on a palm tree near the water lilies.
    “And this howea which won’t stop growing is Tadeus. He was the kindest one. He used to say, ‘Tell me, Aurora, do you think you’ll ever love me? Because, as you know, I just adore you and I want to live with you.’ He was so sweet, poor Tadeus … Then he got a bit too persistent and eventually even quite nasty. There’s no getting away from it, with boys, if they love you and you don’t love them they call you a bitch. That’s oversimplifying, isn’t it?”
    Aurora talked on and on with an almost singsong accent, and I could see Antonio was increasingly unsettled.
    “Monstro’s another story,” Aurora went on, “I don’t like shortsighted boys. They make you feel you should protect them, and when they wake up in the morning their glasses are always more important than you. One day Monstro—”
    I put my hand up to my glasses without even thinking, and she burst out laughing. She tapped her finger on the copy of
Contos aquosos
that was peeping out of my pocket.
    “What are you reading?”
    “They’re short stories.”
    I handed the book to her, and she took it and leafed through it, frowning, but smiling too.
    “Jaime Montestrela … What a weird name. It doesn’t mean anything to me. The stories are